


go on and ring that bell

by orphan_account



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Fear of Death, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Other, Out of Body Experiences, The Suffering Game, it was love all along, only magnus/taako if you want it to be, takes place during the suffering game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-10-08 07:40:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10381800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “Bad luck,” Edward says, and you think you hear a bell ring, but you can’t tell because Edward’s voice is echoing and dissonant in a way you’ve never heard before. It isn’t like you’re passing out, because you’re fully conscious, and you go reeling back. You instinctively move your arms out to catch yourself, but your arms don’t move, and Railsplitter doesn’t stop your fall, and you go flying out of your body, and ithurts.It isn’t like it’s ripping a bandage or getting punched out, but it feels like overwhelming force, and then something bone-chilling grips your entire being, but you aren’t cold. You’re just numb. And then your vision goes, and the entire world is grey.





	

**Author's Note:**

> (title from the song "raise hell" by brandi carlile.)
> 
> i'm not very good at writing magnus, so this is my way of finding his voice. have some inner monologue from magnus during his near-death experience in Wonderland!

There are no silhouettes at the edge of the catwalk where the three of you had been just moments before disregarding all dignity and strutting your collective stuff (what little of it you had left), but a spotlight identical to the one you’re standing under turns from nowhere to shine on an empty circle of the raised platform. You look at one another briefly and peek through the crowd of mannequins in order to try and avoid being caught off guard by the liches, but before you do, their disembodied clapping rings out across the room of stone-still wooden people.

“You did it,” Edward cries, voice jubilant. “I don’t know how, but you did it!”

Lydia echoes his excitement. “Very few people have stood where you’re standing now, having conquered suffering itself to claim their prize. Give them a hand, folks!”

The mannequins rise and the noise of a roaring crowd spreads across the room, echoing off walls you can’t really see and bouncing right at you. It’s deafening. They only quiet down when The liches begin to speak again, voices booming over the clapping as the crowd’s noise dies.

“This resolve, this desire to do whatever it takes no matter the cost to save yourselves -- Do you know who you three remind me of?”

You furrow your brow, look at your friends. They look right back.

“No?” You say, more of a question.

“Who?” Merle asks.

Taako is silent, watching the mannequins return to their seats through half-lidded eyes, swaying slightly on his feet from exhaustion. You press your palm into his lower back to keep him upright, offering him your side to lean on. He accepts without looking at you. 

The liches say “us!” in unison and you articulate your feelings with the most disgusted sound. Taako snorts, and Merle adjusts his backpack as the three of you make a forced launch into the story of Edward and Lydia. For the most part, you tune them out, taking a moment to examine your friends.

Merle looks exhausted. He squints now without his night vision, and he leans forward on his toes to try and get out of the spotlight’s harsh beam. He’s favoring his left leg, and he’s feebly clutching the Extreme Teen Bible as opposed to his usual devout cradle. The lack of insight from Pan had really disheartened him. He’s bleeding from his nose and from somewhere at his abdomen that you can’t quite see, but he looks confident, determined, ready to end their stay in Wonderland.

Taako looks much worse.

Well, worse is relative. Wonderland has changed him, and you can tell. You can see clear as day the effects that his magic couldn’t cover up to you. His hair has lost some of its natural wave, and now spreads limply across his shoulders and down his back. His lips are smaller. His eyebrows are thinner, plainer. (That’s what Lydia had said, wasn’t it?) The effects aren’t solely magical, either. Though Taako had been patched enough so that he wasn’t bleeding out on the catwalk, he still leans heavily on you and Merle to walk. His hair is matted with sweat and sticking to his forehead rather than pushed out of his face. His nose is bleeding in a steady stream, and his clothes are torn and bloodied from wounds now clotted, but he still stands.

You tune in once you’ve deduced they’re not going to die, right when Edward finishes explaining that “these games are actually kind of a new touch that we’re _pretty_ excited about!” His voice drips with ardor, and he laughs a little before Lydia chimes in right after.

“And thanks to your Animus Bell, business has been _booming!_ ”

The Animus bell. You’re beginning to grow tired of this kind of back and forth between them with no input from you. When do you get out of this? You’ve won. It’s over. The bell is yours.

Suddenly a figure appears in the empty spotlight at the edge of the catwalk, and you don’t have to squint to recognize that it’s Edward, striking a pose as he approaches you. As he moves, the mannequins all move at once, crowding the stage. You and Merle gently guard Taako between the two of you, but as you tense and draw your weapons, you notice that despite their arms reaching fanatically at you, none of them make any attempt to climb up and fight. You slowly let down your guard and motion for Merle to do the same. You take your place between the two of them once again. You’re always in the middle.

Edward pauses right before your spotlights cross; it looks like two cells dividing, right about to become their own but still slightly connected. He lowers the sunglasses he wasn’t wearing the last time you all saw him and smiles a dazzling smile. “This place,” he says, gesturing around them at the darkness, “has always thrived because of… what else? Advertising!”

“We’ve got a few consistent channels. Surely you received a brochure in the mail--” you remember Lucretia’s worn hands unfolding a gaudy poster for Wonderland, the Animus bell almost taunting you from the page “--or saw our billboards--” you remember the billboards lining the path to your door “--or met someone drawn here by a beam of magical light--” you remember Rowan’s face, a pained ‘why?’ as you realized who you had forsaken.

“Those are just a few tools of the trade. But do you all know the most successful form of advertising?” Your eyebrows furrow, and the three of you apparently come up with the same answer milliseconds apart. _Word of mouth._

Edward looks right at you, discarding his sunglasses in a puff of smoke, smile stark-white and dangerous as the spotlight caught all the sharp lines and shadows on his face. “Magnus,” he says, and his voice is like ice in your ears, in your chest. “You landed on skull in the last round, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” you say cautiously, and you step forward, holding Railsplitter tightly.

“Bad luck,” Edward says, and you think you hear a bell ring, but you can’t tell because Edward’s voice is echoing and dissonant in a way you’ve never heard before. It isn’t like you’re passing out, because you’re fully conscious, and you go reeling back. You instinctively move your arms out to catch yourself, but your arms don’t move, and Railsplitter doesn’t stop your fall, and you go flying out of your body, and it _hurts._

It isn’t like it’s ripping a bandage or getting punched out, but it feels like overwhelming force, and then something bone-chilling grips your entire being, but you aren’t cold. You’re just numb. And then your vision goes, and the entire world is grey.

The back of you, the body you were once inside, rights itself. From the corner of your eyes, you can see scurrying white-eyed figures all running to hide from you, but you can’t bring yourself to focus on anything that isn’t the scene in front of you.

The body that once held Magnus Burnsides uses Railsplitter to right itself, and from the smoke behind it, Lydia steps forward, touching its shoulder. Your shoulder. And you can’t feel it, but you can see a light glowing from inside it, and you know that light is Edward just from the way Lydia’s hand lingers on his shoulder, comfortable and at ease.

“You know, boys, I don’t think Wonderland’s that bad. You know I feel like I’ve learned a lot about myself here, and I feel like our friendship has grown even more powerful, don’t you think?”

 _I didn’t say that,_ you say, but it doesn’t come out of your mouth, and nobody hears you.

You can hear them speaking still, hear yourself speaking without your direction, but it’s like their words are three caves over, echoing and chaotic and shrouded in whispers all at once. You want to cry, but you can’t. “I think I’m gonna head to Neverwinter and tell everyone I meet to get down here to Wonderland ASAP,” Edward says, but it’s your voice that comes out. You reach your hand out, but you are drifting backwards at a steady float and you can’t quite reach your own skin. “Lots of riches! More than I can even carry out!”

Merle and Taako look at one another, and you realize there’s a roaring behind you that you hadn’t noticed before.

A tear is suspended in the darkness behind you, and you don’t know much about rifts, but you’ve seen this rift before. You know exactly what’s happening. Edward is using the body of Magnus Burnsides as a puppet, and his soul is drifting. _You_ are drifting.

The tear shifts and ripples, and while you can’t see anything inside, you know what awaits you there. The Astral Plane. Kravitz. Death. And you’re going there because you’re dying.

You turn back to see Edward using your body to step menacingly closer to Merle and Taako. You reach out your hand, flailing wildly to try and fight the pull. You don’t succeed. “What if,” Edward muses, and in the echoes of your own voice you can tell the cadence is all wrong. “You guys turn around and go back into Wonderland and I’ll keep the bell. And you’ll get to go back in there, but you’ll get to live! How does that sound?”

Taako grits his teeth and steps closer to Edward, spitting blood at the ground as he does. He’s swaying on his feet. “I got a fuckin’ idea for you,” he says with a sneer, and his body falls to the floor. You shout, and the Astral Plane gives a particularly strong tug, and you are sent spinning, and you can’t see anything but the approaching emptiness. Didn’t you see more before?

In Lucas’ lab, the Astral Plane hadn’t been this sinister. It was peaceful, and you had looked at it with sincerity, and you swear you had seen Julia’s smile. Now it was stormy, pitch black and shining with an oily look to it. There are no souls. There is no Kravitz.

You see a hand rip out of the inky blackness as something fights to get to the surface of the water, and just as you see Kravitz’ gasping and sputtering form break the surface,, just as you feel the tendrils of the Astral Plane begin to suck you in by your feet, something very real and very familiar grabs you, and it _pulls_. You turn in nothingness, and Taako’s soul is behind you, and it is glowing, and it looks like the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.

 _Taako!_ you cry, and you feel like you _would_ be crying were it not for the lack of ability to do so. _You don’t have to do this._

You don’t know why you say that. The Astral Plane doesn’t look good through the rift, but a part of you knows Julia is there somewhere, and that part of you feels like kicking Taako’s soul away. It wants to send him flying back to his body and let itself die. You had been so okay with dying, it says, and it clenches. What changed?

Taako shakes his head and grins at you, pulling you further away, fighting the pull of the Astral Plane. It feels good. It feels _so_ good, and Taako’s hand only leaves yours when he tugs hard enough to send you both flying backwards, at which point he wraps his entire body around yours. His hair flies around him wildly without gravity holding it down, and it somehow tickles your lack of face as you grip him as tightly as possible.

He puts his mouth right up to your ear, and you feel like you’re going to explode when he speaks. _This may sound a little cheesy, but I couldn’t let you go._

You hold Taako as tightly as you can, which is pretty tight considering the two of you now have no real strength or weaknesses as souls in the Ethereal Plane, and for a moment it feels like everything is going to be okay. And then you stop drifting toward your body, and you start drifting towards the Astral Plane again. You know Taako knows, but he doesn’t move to let go despite you trying to resist, trying to get him closer to his body. You can’t fight him properly without your strength in this plane.

 _You can’t die here, Taako! Let me go! This doesn't have to be the end for you!_ you say, and you try and pry him away. _You have so much more to do!_

He holds on tighter. _Nice try_ _, Mango._ he says back, and despite his joke, his voice sounds terrified. _You’re not getting rid of me that easy._

You hold him tighter, and as you press your chin against the top of Taako’s head, just about to let the pull have its way, you watch as Merle turns from the liches, raises his hands high above his head, and an enormous golden-white pair of viney arms weave into the Ethereal Plane. The hands attached to those arms wrap around the pair of you, feeling you out, and once he realizes he has you, Merle clasps his hands and pulls as tightly as he can. Taako goes flying out of your grip, and you go flying back into your body.

You’re lying on the ground, and you’re among the mannequin bodies, and-- Wait. What? You had been up on the catwalk. The catwalk that you can see above you, Taako now standing shakily beside Merle in front of… it doesn’t matter how you got down here, you think. You want nothing more than to be in front of those two, protecting them.

And so you rush in.

You clatter up onto the catwalk and you stand defiantly before the body of Magnus Burnsides, who looks confused, and you look down at your own body with the same expression, and you see fashionable scalemail instead of your armor. You realize you’re in a mannequin, but you also realize that you’re alive, and you’ve been saved by the two people in the world that make your life worth living, and you realize what you have to do. For them.

“Magnus,” Taako asks, reaching out and touching your wooden arm. You don’t react, don't even feel the touch.

You step forward. Your voice, your real voice, booms out across the catwalk from nowhere and it seems to hit Edward all at once what is happening. You would grin if you could at the way his eyes widen and he takes a step back.

“I’ll be having my body back, you undead fuck.”

**Author's Note:**

> wanna talk about this fic, taako/magnus, or the adventure zone at all??? my tumblr is @fullmotionvideos!


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